virus: Self-awareness Software and Reputing

Tadeusz Niwinski (tad@teta.ai)
Fri, 07 Mar 1997 14:31:26 -0800

Alex Williams wrote:
>Self-awareness is just an internal model of ourselves, its really not
>all that spectacular a trick at all, not an essence vital but just a
>"good trick", as others have discussed in other threads. Its good for
>both modeling yourself in a predictive fashion and double-checking
>your modeling assumptions as you run the model on past experiences.
>
>Self-awareness is something that appears to be just a good software
>trick, consciousness requires only that the entity assert that its
>conscious. I don't see a catch.

If self-awareness is software (and I think it is) then we should be able to
make a computer program which would run it.

"Learning" is a simple process to model on a computer: just remember the
losing situations and before making a (random) decision consult the losing
situation (constantly growing) table, and if it's there, try another one, etc.

"Life" has been modeled: start with random sequence of building instructions
(genes), build millions of "creatures", employ a God/Nature agent to decide
which ones are "better", select the best, *repute* (see below) and keep
repeating the process.

*repute* -- how is that for a replication (reproduction) with mutation?,
"repute", "replutation", ("reputation" would be better, but it's taken,
"reprutation" sounds weird); or for "copy with mutation" we can use
"coputation" (not "computation" and not "copulation" :-)), "copute" ? "repute"?

How would a modelling self-awareness software look like?
(We've got two years to do it...) Where do we start?
Are you a software person, Alex?

Regards, Tadeusz (Tad) Niwinski from planet TeTa
tad@teta.ai http://www.teta.ai (604) 985-4159